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The Hacker and the Ants

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1994 novel by Rudy Rucker
The Hacker and the Ants
First edition
AuthorRudy Rucker
LanguageEnglish
GenreScience fiction
PublisherAvoNova
Publication dateMay 1994 (Morrow/AvoNova); May 1995 (AvoNova)
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardcover; softcover)
Pages307
ISBN0-380-71844-8 (1994)
OCLC32732575
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The Hacker and the Ants is a science fiction novel by American writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker, published in 1994 by Avon Books. It was written while Rucker was working as a programmer at Autodesk, Inc., of Sausalito, California from 1988 to 1992.

Plot summary

Jerzy Rugby is trying to create truly intelligent robots. While his actual life crumbles, Rugby toils in his virtual office, testing the robots online. Then, something goes wrong and zillions of computer virus ants invade the net. Rugby is the man wanted for the crime. He's been set up to take a fall for a giant cyberconspiracy and he needs to figure out who — or what — is sabotaging the system in order to clear his name. Plunging deep into the virtual worlds of Antland of Fnoor to find some answers, Rugby confronts both electronic and all-too-real perils, facing death itself in a battle for his freedom.

Transrealism

The main character is a transrealist interpretation of Rucker's life in the 1970s. (Rucker taught mathematics at the State University College at Geneseo, New York from 1972 to 1978.) As such, though the character is fictional, he bears some exaggerated resemblance to Rucker's interpretation of himself at the time. Rucker tells John Shirley in the introduction to recent editions, "I have never really left my body and gone to infinity's Heaven."

References

  1. "The Hacker and the Ants". www.goodreads.com. Retrieved 2019-04-01.
  2. Rudy Rucker's Biography

External links

Works of Rudy Rucker
Novels
The Ware Tetralogy
Transreal novels
  • White Light (1980)
  • Spacetime Donuts (1981)
  • The Sex Sphere (1983)
  • The Secret of Life (1985)
  • The Hacker and the Ants (1994) (Revised 'Version 2.0' 2003)
  • Saucer Wisdom (1999) novel marketed as non-fiction
  • The Big Aha (2013)
Other Novels
Short fiction collections
  • The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka (1983)
  • Transreal!, also includes some non-fiction essays (1991)
  • Gnarl! (2000), complete short stories
  • Mad Professor (2006)
  • Complete Stories (2012)
  • Transreal Cyberpunk, with Bruce Sterling (2016)
Non-fiction
As author
  • Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension (1977)
  • Infinity and the Mind (1982)
  • The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality (1984)
  • Mind Tools (1987)
  • All the Visions (1991),
  • Seek! (1999)
  • Software Engineering and Computer Games (2002)
  • The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me about Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and how to be Happy (2005)
  • Nested Scrolls (2011)
  • Collected Essays (2012)
  • Journals 1990-2014 (2015)
As editor


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